Poorly Elvis :(

So Elvis has had a few problems recently - some small, some not so.

We had a weird problem a few weeks back when we woke up to find our coach batteries run down to zero, and over the past week we've been seeing weird readings on our battery meter ranging from 14V (charging) to <11V (less than empty). We had just spent a week in the back of beyond and had nearly made it back to civilisation when the engine died. After a bit of messing around (we even had a helpful tractor driver try to jump start us but to no avail) I pulled the coach battery out of the back, which allowed us to limp 10km into Comitán, a decent sized town near the Guatemalan border.

We spent the night in a Walmart car park and the next day was a bank holiday so we weren't holding out much hope but the first mechanic shop we came across just happened to be an alternator specialist. In 2 minutes he had it diagnosed and in under an hour it was fixed for 20 quid!

We decided not to try and sort the broken front shock there and limped back to San Christobal, where we were going to be staying for a few days. The front shock is only a month old too, but the roads and topes (speed bumps) are pretty evil around here.

The good news is the battery problem appears to have fixed the highly worrying propane alarm going off. I just need to fix a leaking indoor shower, wire in a proper volt meter so we can see what's going on in more detail, and patch up a bit of paint work that blistered in the rainforest heat/humidity...

We're actually pretty lucky that this happened in Mexico, with a plethora of good and cheap mechanics and also we weren't hundreds of miles from a big town.

Fingers crossed this is the last of Elvis's health problems, but I wouldn't lay any money on it.Read more